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differentNo. 1<br />
March 2017<br />
Gucci’s Alessandro Michele<br />
Causing a stir in the fashion world, with a different way of thinking
ALESSAN<br />
Design<br />
Desiree Ng, for<br />
Typography II class<br />
Nanyang Technological University<br />
School of Art, Design and Media<br />
2017<br />
Playfair display, Baskerville, Nunito<br />
Text<br />
as credited in the bylines<br />
text may be condensed,<br />
due to length<br />
Images<br />
as credited in the bylines<br />
all rights reserved
ackground story the difference in philosophy resulting success<br />
DRO<br />
MICHELE
different<br />
1/<br />
Every issue, we feature someone<br />
with a different way of thinking,<br />
regardless of their fields, revolutionalising<br />
the way we view the world.<br />
This issue: Alessandro Michele<br />
Who: Creative director at Gucci.<br />
Born in Rome, Italy in 1972.<br />
Why: Shaped the way we think about<br />
luxury fashion and revived Gucci<br />
with a romantic vision that resonated<br />
with many customers, after years of<br />
declining sales<br />
How: After more than a decade working<br />
behind the scenes at Gucci, he<br />
got the job in an unexpected turn of<br />
events at the house, and was able to<br />
realise the vision he had for Gucci.<br />
Background story<br />
What was the context in which Alessandro Michele was<br />
able to realise the vision he had and to make the change<br />
he wanted to make? John Koblin, from the New York<br />
Times, shares his take on the background story.
Photographs from Gucci.com. Portrait of Alessandro Michele from Harper’s Bazaar..<br />
2/ 3/<br />
The difference in philosophy<br />
What was the difference in Alessandro Michele that<br />
caused the flurry of excitement in the fashion world?<br />
Rebecca Mead, from The New Yorker, writes about the<br />
Renaissance man and how his vision reached beyond<br />
the clothes that the house was selling.<br />
Resulting success<br />
Ruby Abbiss, from thefashionlaw.com, analyses the success<br />
of Gucci under Alessandro Michele and what this<br />
could mean for the future of fashion and Gucci.<br />
content
Image from theweek.co.uk
01 At Gucci, a messy exit for<br />
one designer opens an<br />
unlikely door for another<br />
background<br />
written by John Koblin for The New York Times<br />
Patrizio di Marco wasn’t about to go out quietly.<br />
In early December, Mr. di Marco was ousted as<br />
chief executive of Gucci, a position he had held<br />
for five years, in a move that, while long speculated,<br />
still came as something of a shock to the<br />
global fashion world. And Mr. di Marco wanted<br />
to make it clear to the Gucci staff that he had<br />
been fired; he had no intention of leaving without<br />
giving his side of the story.<br />
On Dec. 18, Mr. di Marco delivered remarks to<br />
Gucci employees at a company cafeteria in Florence,<br />
Italy. Part of his speech was inspired from<br />
a memo that he sent out to employees that day,<br />
which was equal parts defiant and self-congratulatory.<br />
(At one point, he quoted Steve Jobs, saying,<br />
“The ones who are crazy enough to think that<br />
they can change the world are the ones who do.”)<br />
And above all, it was bitter, blaming his enemies<br />
at Gucci — he didn’t name names but instead<br />
referred to them as “nani,” or dwarfs — who he<br />
implied had plotted his downfall.<br />
Mr. di Marco spoke not just as a spurned executive<br />
of one of the biggest fashion companies in<br />
the world, but also as one half of fashion’s most<br />
famous power couple, the partner of the Gucci<br />
designer Frida Giannini and the father of their<br />
nearly 2-year-old daughter, born just two weeks<br />
after Ms. Giannini had presented the fashion<br />
house’s fall 2013 collection on the Milan runway.<br />
She, too, had been ousted from the company in<br />
December in a parting that was anything but<br />
amicable and was about to get worse.<br />
If the dual firings of Mr. di Marco and Ms.<br />
Giannini came as a surprise, that was nothing<br />
compared with the reaction to the person whom<br />
Kering, Gucci’s parent company, soon chose<br />
to install in Ms. Giannini’s place: Alessandro<br />
Michele.<br />
Within hours of the news of Ms. Giannini’s firing,<br />
names surfaced in the news media about who<br />
would fill her post, suddenly the most coveted<br />
job in fashion. Would it be Riccardo Tisci, the<br />
star designer who took a drifting French label,<br />
Givenchy, and transformed it into the must-have<br />
uniform for rock stars and celebrities? Or the<br />
rising American designer Joseph Altuzarra? Or<br />
maybe Hedi Slimane, who had recently revived<br />
the fortunes of Saint Laurent, another Kering<br />
brand? Or could Kering even entice Tom Ford<br />
to go back to the company he had turned into<br />
the hottest fashion brand of the 1990s and whose<br />
work at Gucci is still cited by many designers<br />
today?<br />
Instead, on Jan. 21, the company announced it<br />
had hired Mr. Michele, who had spent the last 12<br />
years working in Gucci’s accessories department,<br />
the last three as the associate director to Ms.<br />
Giannini.<br />
And the reaction of the fashion world could be<br />
summed up with one word: “Who?”<br />
In interviews, a number of fashion industry<br />
executives were surprised that Gucci would<br />
appoint Mr. Michele, though none were willing to<br />
be quoted by name out of fear of criticizing the<br />
company’s choice.<br />
“I don’t know what to think,” said one fashion<br />
executive who has worked with Kering but who<br />
would speak only on the condition of anonymity,<br />
when asked about the appointment of Mr.<br />
Michele. “It makes no sense to me. I didn’t expect<br />
them to go with an unknown.”<br />
WHEN FRIDA GIANNINI was let go in December,<br />
after several years of mixed reviews and<br />
increasingly sluggish sales for a brand that is crucial<br />
to the parent company’s bottom line, she was<br />
given the chance to bow out gracefully. She would<br />
be able to show her men’s collection in January<br />
and her women’s collection in late February.<br />
But something seemed to go awry soon after the<br />
December announcement that both she and Mr.<br />
di Marco would be leaving.<br />
Within days of Mr. di Marco’s departure, tension<br />
grew between Ms. Giannini and Gucci, according<br />
background story<br />
7
Instead, on Jan. 21, the company announced it had hired<br />
Mr. Michele, who had spent the last 12 years working in<br />
Gucci’s accessories department, the last three as the associate<br />
director to Ms. Giannini. And the reaction of the fashion<br />
world could be summed up with one word: “Who?”<br />
to two people directly familiar with the situation<br />
but who weren’t authorized to speak for the company.<br />
Barely a week into the job, Mr. di Marco’s<br />
replacement, Marco Bizzarri, apparently found<br />
the situation untenable.<br />
On Jan. 9, Ms. Giannini, after more than 12 years<br />
with the company, was immediately dismissed.<br />
She left the building that day, assisted by a few<br />
colleagues who helped her carry out her belongings,<br />
according to two people with knowledge<br />
of the situation. (Through a spokesman, Mr.<br />
Bizzarri and Mr. Michele declined to comment.<br />
Mr. di Marco and Ms. Giannini did not respond<br />
to several requests, by email and by phone, for<br />
comment.)<br />
In the fashion industry, the vacancy meant a giant<br />
opportunity. Both Kering and its main rival in<br />
the fashion world, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis<br />
Vuitton, had used recent job openings to make<br />
star acquisitions. In the last few years, Raf Simons<br />
was hired at Dior, replacing John Galliano;<br />
Alexander Wang replaced Nicolas Ghesquière<br />
at Kering’s Balenciaga; Mr. Ghesquière went to<br />
LVMH’s Louis Vuitton. Mr. Slimane, the former<br />
Dior Homme designer, went to Saint Laurent<br />
after a several-year break from fashion to focus on<br />
his photography. In nearly every case, that splashy<br />
hire resulted in business success.<br />
Suggesting a similarly big move might be in the<br />
offing, the Kering chief executive, François-Henri<br />
Pinault, said in December that Gucci needed a<br />
new point of view, complete with “more daring<br />
shows.”<br />
At first, all eyes centered on Givenchy’s Mr.<br />
Tisci, whose name had long been circulated in<br />
connection to the Gucci gig. Those talks never<br />
happened, Mr. Tisci said.<br />
“No, no, no,” Mr. Tisci said, when asked at the<br />
couture shows in Paris last month if he had been<br />
contacted by Kering. “I’m happy at the house I’m<br />
staying at.”<br />
Mr. Bizzarri and Mr. Pinault didn’t come close<br />
to hiring any outside designers, according to two<br />
people familiar with the process. They quickly<br />
settled on Ms. Giannini’s longtime colleague Mr.<br />
Michele. He came to Gucci with Ms. Giannini;<br />
the two worked together at Fendi before that.<br />
“I have to say, I think many people were surprised<br />
with the decision because Gucci is so important<br />
and drives such significant revenues to the group,”<br />
said Imran Amed, the founder of The Business of<br />
Fashion. “That being said, the industry is willing<br />
to wait and see.”<br />
Mr. Michele rushed a men’s collection together<br />
in January, and his first official show as creative<br />
director of Gucci will be the one that was supposed<br />
to be Ms. Giannini’s last: the women’s fall<br />
collection this week in Milan.<br />
Gucci dominates Kering’s luxury business. (Kering<br />
was formerly known as PPR, and known before<br />
that as the Gucci Group.) In 2014, Gucci had<br />
3.49 billion euros in revenue, or nearly $4 billion.<br />
The next two biggest luxury revenue earners at<br />
Kering were Bottega Veneta and Saint Laurent,<br />
that brought in, combined, $2 billion.<br />
The company is nearly a century old, but it<br />
became a significant profit and revenue generator<br />
only in the last two decades. In the early 1990s,<br />
Gucci nearly went bankrupt.<br />
“The company was broke,” said Domenico De<br />
Sole, the former chief executive of the Gucci<br />
Group, by telephone. “It had a fantastic name,<br />
but the family had mismanaged it.”<br />
Mr. De Sole, along with Mr. Ford, quickly<br />
changed that. Mr. Ford’s work as creative director<br />
has become one of the most celebrated turnarounds<br />
in fashion history. He infused Gucci with<br />
sexiness, minted fashion stars (Carine Roitfeld<br />
was one) and built an empire. In the years after<br />
Mr. Ford and Mr. De Sole’s success, the company<br />
bought Bottega Veneta and purchased stakes in<br />
Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney.<br />
When Mr. Ford and Mr. De Sole left the company<br />
in 2004, Gucci was earning revenue of $3 billion,<br />
up from the $200 million it made when they took<br />
over a decade earlier. Gucci Group executives<br />
got their first crack at a major succession plan. It<br />
failed. It split up leadership ranks and appointed<br />
three bosses: Alessandra Facchinetti headed<br />
women’s wear; John Ray controlled men’s; and<br />
Ms. Giannini led accessories. Ms. Facchinetti was<br />
gone by 2005, Mr. Ray in early 2006, and soon<br />
Ms. Giannini was the sole creative director at<br />
Gucci, producing both men’s and women’s wear.<br />
When she took over, Mr. Ford’s iconic sexy<br />
designs went by the wayside, but the money and<br />
profits kept pouring in.<br />
In early 2009, Mr. di Marco was appointed Gucci<br />
chief executive after having achieved considerable<br />
financial success at Bottega Veneta. Six months<br />
later, his relationship with Ms. Giannini became<br />
8 background story
LEFT: Gucci Autumn/Winter ‘15 campaign,<br />
featuring both womenswear and menswear.<br />
The menswear collection was the first<br />
of Alessandro’s at the helm of Gucci, which<br />
he redesigned and presented within 5 days<br />
(Image from i-D)<br />
romantic, a development that was largely unknown<br />
outside the company until the two went public nearly two<br />
years later.<br />
In 2012, Mr. di Marco and Ms. Giannini had a daughter.<br />
It was around that time that Gucci’s growth came to a<br />
halt. Just as significant, Gucci went from being one of the<br />
hottest shows on the European fashion calendar to just<br />
another stop for editors and buyers.<br />
“It went from an internationally recognized leader in fashion<br />
and became more provincial and product focused,”<br />
said Mr. Amed, of The Business of Fashion. “It was no<br />
longer a brand that would create ripples of influence in<br />
the industry as it once had under Tom Ford. When you<br />
lose creative influence, the numbers and money eventually<br />
catch up.”<br />
Gucci’s operating profit dropped 6.7 percent in 2014;<br />
Kering has had back-to-back years in losses in profit,<br />
despite strong returns from other labels like Saint Laurent<br />
and Bottega Veneta.<br />
A little over six months later, they were both out of a job.<br />
In the interview process, Mr. Michele presented a plan<br />
that greatly diverged from Ms. Giannini’s, with Mr.<br />
Bizzarri telling the news media that the selection of Mr.<br />
Michele was “based upon the contemporary vision he has<br />
articulated for the brand.”<br />
Mr. Michele’s hastily cobbled-together men’s collection,<br />
shown in January, was notable for its androgynous looks<br />
that signaled a departure from his predecessor, a clean<br />
break with the past.<br />
In his farewell memo, Mr. di Marco said that he lost his<br />
job, in part, because unnamed people within the company,<br />
“including some of the people close to him,” had started<br />
to plot against him. (Mr. Pinault, the chief executive of<br />
Kering, is not mentioned in the memo.)<br />
But he was also wistful.<br />
“Gucci is the brand I’ve loved the most in my life, the<br />
brand I will always love, and it’s also the brand where I<br />
met the love of my life,” he wrote.<br />
He said he wanted to honor many people at Gucci, but he<br />
singled out just one: Ms. Giannini.<br />
“Not because she’s the best possible life partner or the<br />
best possible mother that a difficult and complicated<br />
person like me could have hoped to meet,” he wrote. “But<br />
because in the workplace — which we both put above<br />
everything, at great personal cost — she was the best<br />
possible partner that one could have wished for.”<br />
Ms. Giannini’s story as creative director lasted eight years.<br />
Mr. Michele’s began Wednesday.<br />
background story<br />
9
2 Gucci’s<br />
renaissance man<br />
Photograph by Davide Montelleone, for The New Yorker<br />
10 the difference in philosophy
the difference in philosophy<br />
Alessandro Michele, the brand’s creative director,<br />
looks at modern fashion with a historical eye.<br />
by Rebecca Mead, for The New Yorker<br />
Several years ago, Gucci, which started in<br />
Florence in the nineteen-twenties as a small leather-goods<br />
concern, moved its design headquarters<br />
to Rome, where it occupies a grand Renaissance<br />
building called the Palazzo Alberini-Cicciaporci.<br />
The palazzo was completed around 1520,<br />
following a plan ascribed to Raphael, and many<br />
art historians discern his touch in the elegantly<br />
geometric façade. Other aspects of the building<br />
have been attributed to his chief assistant, Giulio<br />
Romano, who worked in Raphael’s studio for<br />
years before going on to forge the new style of<br />
Mannerism.<br />
The palazzo’s former chapel -- a light-filled chamber<br />
with a coffered ceiling that is edged by newly<br />
restored frescoes—is now the office of Gucci’s<br />
creative director. Since January, 2015, this position<br />
has been held by Alessandro Michele, a fortythree-year-old<br />
native of Rome, who has worked at<br />
Gucci for fourteen years. Before his ascension, he<br />
was second-in-command at the company, overseeing<br />
its lucrative line of accessories.<br />
When Michele took over the chapel-office, he<br />
did away with the sleek modernist couches<br />
that had been installed there, filling the space<br />
instead with his impressive collection of antiques.<br />
Empire chairs upholstered in golden brocade<br />
now rest on Oriental carpets. He brought in<br />
an enormous double desk from the nineteenth<br />
century, designed so that two people could work<br />
opposite each other. When I visited the office,<br />
in April, the desktop was stacked with beautiful<br />
old objects, from a gilded Roman-style wreath to<br />
a nineteenth-century English translation of the<br />
Decameron, published in the nineteen-thirties,<br />
with Art Nouveau woodcut illustrations. (Michele<br />
is reading it to polish his English.) Michele bought<br />
the desk at one of the many antique stores he<br />
frequents in Florence. “I was in love with this<br />
desk from the first time I saw it, but I didn’t have<br />
the space,” he told me. “When I got this office,<br />
I called the owners and said, ‘Now I have the<br />
space.’ ”<br />
Michele’s predecessor, Frida Giannini, was the<br />
creative director for eight years, and during that<br />
period she and Patrizio di Marco, Gucci’s C.E.O.,<br />
began a relationship and had a child. Near the<br />
end of her tenure, fashion critics grew bored with<br />
her clothes, many of which reworked themes that<br />
Gucci had been exploring since the nineties, when<br />
Tom Ford, the American designer, revitalized the<br />
brand with outré glamour. Sales fell, and in December,<br />
2014, Giannini and di Marco were fired.<br />
Michele, having labored for years in the Giulio<br />
Romano role—sublimating his creative vision in<br />
the service of another while quietly learning how<br />
the company worked—stepped into the Raphael<br />
position with aplomb. Within a week, he had<br />
the difference in philosophy<br />
11
Photographs from Gucci.com, taken on the Gucci Cruise 2016 runway<br />
Gucci Cruise 2016<br />
12 the difference in philosophy
overseen the design of an entirely new men’s collection, a foppish conception that was<br />
a decisive swerve from the bourgeois luxury of Giannini’s menswear designs (sweaters<br />
in muted colors, tasteful cashmere peacoats). Michele’s clothes would have pleased the<br />
earliest inhabitants of the Palazzo Alberini: a blouselike pink shirt fastened at the neck<br />
with a pussycat bow; mink-lined mules with horse-bit buckles. Michele gave the runway<br />
show of the collection a modern edge by presenting the garments on both male and<br />
female models. On January 21, 2015, two days after the show, Michele was officially<br />
promoted to creative director.<br />
That February, he produced his first women’s collection, which was shown on a parade<br />
of wan models—some of them slightly funny-looking, many of them in nerdy glasses.<br />
The designs, like Michele’s antiques collection, suggested a voracious curatorial eye.<br />
One model wore a floral tea gown with furry slippers—a supple combination of thirties<br />
débutante and fifties housewife. A transparent peach-colored blouse with a ruffled<br />
neckline was boldly paired with a scarlet leather skirt. Michele was offering a startling<br />
miscellany inflected with a high-end vintage sensibility. Although he had invented<br />
the clothes, it was as if they had been culled from a thrift store to which centuries of<br />
Roman princesses had consigned their most extravagant castoffs.<br />
The collection was initially greeted with warm, if guarded, curiosity. Vanessa Friedman,<br />
the Times critic, wrote, “It wasn’t Fashion, it was fashion; a parade of pieces with<br />
a nostalgic romance that could be plucked from a wardrobe, or plunked into one, with<br />
ease.” Within a few months, though, the fashion world had fully embraced Michele’s<br />
cluttered, retro sensibility. After Gucci’s Cruise collection was shown in New York in<br />
the summer of 2015, Nicole Phelps observed, in Vogue, “We all shoot the hell out of<br />
it, and, more critically, we want to wear it.” Adrian Joffe, the president of Comme<br />
des Garçons and of the high-fashion retail chain Dover Street Market, told me, “The<br />
whole spirit of it was a complete revolution, a deep change.” Most designers present a<br />
new set of looks each season, with the implication that last season’s clothes have fallen<br />
utterly out of style. Michele lightly tweaks his template from season to season. “Alessandro<br />
tells a story,” Joffe said.<br />
“I love the animal world. Within nature there is always something<br />
unexpected and for me I find it a great source of inspiration.”<br />
Alessandro Michele, on his inspiration for the Cruise 2016 collection<br />
Michele’s clothes are pretty but not overtly sexy. Although they have a youthful verve,<br />
he has a preference for long sleeves, high necklines, and below-the-knee skirts of the<br />
sort that can also flatter grown women. In the twelve collections that he has presented<br />
so far, he has not isolated a single silhouette and made it his signature, nor has he<br />
mined a single historical period. Rather, his clothes reflect a broad study of costume<br />
and, in particular, of the ways adornment and embellishment have been used over<br />
centuries. Instead of making references to the movies or photography—common inspirational<br />
recourses for contemporary designers—Michele’s clothes are shaped by the<br />
decades he has spent exploring the flea markets, museums, and archives of European<br />
cities. A person who visits the eighteenth-century galleries at the Victoria & Albert<br />
Museum, in London, might pause before one opulent display -- a two-hundred-andeighty-year-old<br />
waistcoat in yellow satin, richly embroidered with full-blown flowers<br />
and feathered scrolls—and wonder just how long Michele has spent gazing at it, taking<br />
notes.<br />
Michele’s approach to design can be almost comically cerebral. He has a fondness for<br />
issuing explanatory texts for his shows which allude to postmodernist philosophy—a<br />
tendency that reveals the influence of his partner, Giovanni Attili, a professor of urban<br />
planning who is well versed in critical theory. A note for a recent men’s collection cites<br />
Gilles Deleuze’s idea of “assemblage,” observing that Michele’s clothes “become an<br />
assemblage of fragments emerging from a temporal elsewhere: resurfacing epiphanies,<br />
entangled and unexpected.”<br />
Immersed as Michele is in the “temporal elsewhere,” his clothes are firmly aligned with<br />
current cultural themes. The actor and model Hari Nef, who is transgender, appeared<br />
in the Fall 2016 men’s show. She told me, “There is nothing inherently subversive<br />
the difference in philosophy<br />
13
Photographs from Gucci.com, Spring Summer 2016<br />
“I’m obsessed with decoration,<br />
orientalism, and<br />
codes that belong to other<br />
cultures, remixing them<br />
and redesigning them the<br />
way I like.”<br />
Alessandro Michele, on the Spring Summer 2016 collection<br />
about a robin’s-egg-blue blouse with a black<br />
grosgrain ribbon that you tie in the front—but,<br />
when you put it on a skinny teen-age boy, there<br />
is something really sinister about that, and punk<br />
about that.” She went on, “Alessandro is placing<br />
these priceless garments that you can’t argue with<br />
in a very radical context. You are going home<br />
with this coat that you want to wear, and your<br />
mom wants to wear, and your grandma wants to<br />
wear—but that coat was shown on a boy, or it has<br />
a giant green snake on the back, and the inner<br />
lining of it is blood red. It is a little nasty and it is<br />
grotesque, but it’s beautiful.”<br />
When I visited Rome, Michele was preparing this<br />
year’s Cruise collection, which was to be shown<br />
later in the spring, in London. In an alcove above<br />
his office desk, he had propped one of the inspirations<br />
for the collection: a small English painting,<br />
from the early seventeenth century, of a youthful<br />
figure of indeterminate gender, dressed in a ruff<br />
collar and a tomato-red jacket ornamented with<br />
gold stitching and buttons. The youth’s face was<br />
realistically rendered but the body was stylized,<br />
with awkwardly braced elbows. The figure held<br />
a prayer book that looked remarkably like an<br />
iPhone.<br />
“It is a young guy who looks like a girl, because,<br />
at that time, until you were older, you were com-<br />
14 the difference in philosophy
Madame de Pompadour by François Boucher 1756<br />
bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemaeldesammlungen/Sammlung HypoVereinsbank<br />
Member of UniCredit/Scala, Firenze © 2016. Foto Scala, Firenze/bpk<br />
Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin<br />
pletely dressed like a girl,” Michele said. He has<br />
striking looks himself—long, thick dark hair and a<br />
heavy beard, like Christ as rendered by Leonardo,<br />
with a voluptuous mouth. He speaks excellent<br />
English, with the sort of colorful idiosyncrasies to<br />
be expected from someone who hones his grasp<br />
of the language by reading a nineteenth-century<br />
English translation of fourteenth-century Italian<br />
literature. He said of the painting, “The face,<br />
it’s softer, more real—like Italian Renaissance<br />
painting, but the body is still a very Northern<br />
European pose—it’s very flat. I prefer this to a<br />
lot of Italian painting, because it is more that you<br />
are inventing the character. It’s more unreal. The<br />
body is more like a sheet of paper.”<br />
Michele is a student of the portrait genre. “This<br />
painting is like a Polaroid,” he said. “It is a very<br />
pop way to show your personality.” Discussing the<br />
youth’s costume, he pointed out that similar sartorial<br />
tastes prevail in England today. “This dress<br />
is completely red. With Raphael or Titian, if you<br />
have someone in turquoise you have a piece of<br />
yellow, just to balance. But if you go to London<br />
you see that kind of old woman dressed all in red.<br />
She doesn’t care. If she loves jade green, she is<br />
completely jade green.” (A walk through the Royal<br />
Enclosure at Ascot will confirm this insight.)<br />
“It is something that doesn’t happen on the other<br />
side of Europe. We are more obsessed with, ‘If<br />
you have red shoes, you have to have something<br />
camel on top.’ ”<br />
The painting in the alcove was a replica. The<br />
original, which Michele bought a few years ago,<br />
in London, hangs in his bedroom. He is interested<br />
in the way power was managed through image<br />
in England, particularly during the Tudor era.<br />
“It was a super cruel, and heavy, and dangerous<br />
period,” he said. “But they all looked completely<br />
sure about their power. They were less elegant,<br />
less soft, than Italian people.”<br />
English modes of self-presentation have fascinated<br />
Michele since his youth. Growing up in the<br />
nineteen-eighties in Monte Sacro, on the outskirts<br />
of Rome, he began reading British magazines,<br />
and admired London’s post-punk, New Romantic<br />
street style. By his early teens, he had begun wearing<br />
drainpipe jeans and pointy shoes, and had<br />
cut and bleached his hair into a blond Mohawk.<br />
“The first time I went to London, when I was<br />
eighteen or nineteen, I was completely in love,”<br />
he said. “I was shocked by the way the English<br />
guys and girls dressed.” He roamed the market at<br />
Camden Lock, where antique dealers had stalls<br />
and independent fashion designers sold clothes.<br />
His first job at Gucci was in London, in the design<br />
department, and he lived there from 2002 to<br />
2006. He was impressed by the style of Britons of<br />
all types. “The Queen is one of the most quirky<br />
people in the world,” he told me. “She is very<br />
inspiring. It is clear that she loves color.”<br />
Michele’s study of English style had informed<br />
many of the pieces in the Cruise collection. By<br />
April, most of the designs had been completed,<br />
and I joined him as he looked over sample<br />
garments with members of his team. Michele is<br />
now the boss of his former colleagues, who have<br />
happily adopted the new house aesthetic. When<br />
we arrived in the studio, upstairs from his chapel-office,<br />
he complimented Katia Minniti, Gucci’s<br />
ready-to-wear fur and leather designer, on her<br />
bright-red socks, which were wrinkled around her<br />
ankles and worn with gold high-heeled sandals, a<br />
pleated skirt with a pink print, and a blue blouse.<br />
Michele was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt,<br />
over which he wore a pale-blue bomber jacket;<br />
it had a paisley lining embroidered with his<br />
nickname, Lallo.<br />
Propped against the walls were pushpin boards<br />
to which dozens of appliqué animals, insects,<br />
and birds had been affixed. Michele refers to this<br />
menagerie as the Gucci Garden, because many of<br />
the images draw on the brand’s heritage. There<br />
was a sequinned tiger, and a pair of embroidered<br />
cocker spaniels modelled on pottery figurines<br />
the difference in philosophy<br />
15
“The historical layering<br />
has created a serendipitous<br />
aesthetic - and had<br />
informed Michele’s love of<br />
graceful juxtapositions.”<br />
on Alessandro Michele’s love for churches<br />
made in Staffordshire, England, in the nineteenth century. The<br />
dogs had been introduced into the garden by Michele. (He has<br />
an extensive collection of the figurines.) On a large table, there<br />
were boxes filled with ribbons, buttons, strips of lace, and other<br />
trims.<br />
Models appeared in the new dresses. One gorgeous evening<br />
gown, in cinnamon-and-sapphire-colored silk woven with intricate<br />
patterns, had a dramatic scooped collar and a high neck.<br />
It simultaneously suggested the British Raj and the first Queen<br />
Elizabeth. Another dress, fashioned from translucent pink chiffon<br />
with a high neck and long sleeves, was demure and daringly<br />
revealing at the same time. “Bellissimo!” Michele exclaimed as<br />
he adjusted the collar and positioned black appliqué patches<br />
around the neck. At times, he can seem like a haberdasher with<br />
obsessive-compulsive disorder.<br />
“One of the themes is the Victorian Age,” Michele explained.<br />
Pink is one of his favorite colors, and he scours antique stores in<br />
London to look for evocative shades. One particularly Victorian<br />
design was a long ivory dress, whose sleeves alone might have<br />
served as the calling card for a seamstress seeking employment.<br />
I counted at least six different needlework techniques—including<br />
smocking, pin pleats, and rosettes—that descended from<br />
puffed shoulder to netting-frilled wrist.<br />
Adjusting the music that was emanating from the speaker of<br />
his iPhone—the Smiths—Michele got up from his seat to make<br />
more refinements. He snipped off a black velvet bow that was<br />
attached to a dress’s neckline and moved it a few inches down<br />
the breastbone. After examining a black-and-gold dress, he<br />
grabbed bits of black velvet and stiff tulle and improvised a pair<br />
of cap sleeves, creating a striking sculptural shape. Sometimes<br />
he took out his phone to snap a photograph of a detail.<br />
Michele has more than seventy-five thousand followers on<br />
Instagram, and his account is unusually esoteric. A closeup of<br />
his own feet inside black Mary Janes with silver snake buckles is<br />
intermixed with images of albino peacocks, Baroque sculptures,<br />
and seventeenth-century paintings. (In December, the Web site<br />
Fashionista declared, “Why the Hell Isn’t Everyone Following<br />
Alessandro Michele on Instagram?”)<br />
Photographs from<br />
Gucci.com, Cruise<br />
2017 runway,<br />
held at Westminster<br />
Abbey, an<br />
unlikely location<br />
for a fashion<br />
show<br />
In the studio, Michele’s manner was collaborative rather than<br />
imperious. After surveying the dresses, he and Davide Renne,<br />
the designer of the women’s ready-to-wear collection, sifted<br />
through bolts of fabric—a visual migraine of chinoiserie,<br />
psychedelia, and plaid—making selections for designs that had<br />
yet to be conceived. Michele admired a bright-green print featuring<br />
elephants, monkeys, and birds. Another fabric consisted<br />
of the Union Jack blotted with black silhouettes of parrots, like<br />
images from a Rorschach test. “For the Queen,” Michele said,<br />
with a smile.<br />
There was a decent chance that the Queen might, in fact, become<br />
aware of Michele’s Cruise collection. Gucci had secured<br />
for its show the unlikely location of Westminster Abbey, which<br />
has been the site of every English coronation since 1066. This<br />
was the first time that the abbey would be hosting a fashion<br />
show. Even though Gucci would be occupying the cloister,<br />
rather than laying a runway along the length of the spectacular<br />
Gothic nave, the choice had made headlines in England when it<br />
was announced, in February.<br />
“I was thinking to have a very significant place in London,”<br />
Michele told me over lunch. We were not far from the Palazzo<br />
Alberini, at a favorite restaurant that is owned by Katia Minniti,<br />
the Gucci designer. (She emerged from the kitchen as we<br />
were giving our order, still in red socks and gold heels. Michele<br />
recommended the pasta cacio e pepe, a Roman specialty, but<br />
ate tofu with vegetables.) He told me that he had first considered<br />
presenting the show in a Victorian building on Southampton<br />
Row that used to house the Central St. Martins school of<br />
art. During the nineties, his formative years, many important<br />
British designers had studied at the college. “I was thinking how<br />
great it would be for a brand like Gucci to show in the same<br />
school where Alexander McQueen finished his work, or John<br />
Galliano—there is still a soul in this place,” he said. “But after<br />
16 the difference in philosophy
Photographs from Gucci.com, Spring Summer 2016 Inspiration<br />
I had the opportunity of Westminster I said, ‘Westminster is<br />
exactly what I love about this culture.’ ”<br />
The authorities at the abbey had been surprisingly permissive,<br />
he said, though they had sought assurance that his designs<br />
would not breach acceptable bounds of modesty. (So far,<br />
there had been no problems: for all his love of translucent<br />
fabrics, Michele’s clothes do not show a lot of unveiled flesh.)<br />
“Everything in England happened inside this church,” Michele<br />
went on. “I love church, and I love Gothic, and I love this kind<br />
of aesthetic, so it is kind of a dream to show in this place. One<br />
of the girls who works with me, she said, ‘Probably you will<br />
also want to ask for Buckingham Palace?’ I said, ‘No, I prefer<br />
Westminster.’ ”<br />
As a child, Michele often visited the churches of Rome with<br />
his father, who was interested in historical art, and who also<br />
took him to galleries and museums. Although Michele is not<br />
religious, the habit of visiting places of worship has endured.<br />
“You can feel the power of the people who were inside to<br />
express themselves, or to ask for something,” he said. One of<br />
his favorite places in Rome is the Basilica di San Clemente, a<br />
twelfth-century structure with Byzantine-style mosaics. It was<br />
built over a fourth-century church that itself sat atop a temple<br />
to the Roman god Mithras. The historical layering has created<br />
a serendipitous aesthetic—and had informed Michele’s love of<br />
graceful juxtapositions. “It is beautiful how religion transforms<br />
from other cultures,” he said. “And I also love the Pantheon—in<br />
the center of this big, crazy city, a temple for all the gods.” The<br />
Pantheon’s cupola, with its apex open to the sky, is “like a big<br />
mother,” he said. “It hugs you, with the light inside. It is a very<br />
animistic idea of God. Sometimes when you get inside there<br />
you want to cry.”<br />
Michele’s father worked as a technician at Alitalia, but his<br />
passions lay elsewhere: he sculpted and wrote, and he felt a<br />
close tie to nature. This was the legacy of Michele’s paternal<br />
grandmother, who served as a kind of wise woman to her<br />
community, in the city of L’Aquila. “My father was a shaman,”<br />
Michele told me. “He told me that time doesn’t exist. He didn’t<br />
use a clock. He didn’t know when my birthday was. He would<br />
say, ‘You were born in the autumn—it was a hot autumn, it was<br />
the beginning of the seventies.’ He told me that if you try to<br />
stop with the idea that time exists you will live forever. I said to<br />
him, ‘How can I do it? I need to make appointments.’ But he<br />
With every step,<br />
Rome reveals<br />
something new.<br />
In its decorative<br />
architecture and<br />
narrow streets,<br />
the unexpected<br />
lives. The city’s<br />
beauty, a source<br />
of inspiration for<br />
creative director<br />
Alessandro<br />
Michele, is<br />
indeed eternal—<br />
permanent yet<br />
ever-changing.<br />
the difference in philosophy<br />
17
“I would never have guessed<br />
that I would be given an award<br />
for doing the job that I love, and<br />
for my creativity.”<br />
Alessandro Michele, on winning the International Award<br />
was always late for things, because he didn’t care about appointments. So I think he was quite ready for<br />
his appointment with death.” He died a decade ago. Michele recalls, “He said to me, ‘You and I are very<br />
lucky, because we spent a lot of beautiful seasons together, and they are so many that I can’t remember<br />
how many they are.’ ”<br />
Michele’s mother, who is also deceased, was more urbane. She worked as an assistant to a movie executive,<br />
and her sense of style was influenced by Hollywood. “She had this beautiful blond hair,” he said. “Fake<br />
blond—she’s Italian.” He went on, “I think I am completely the mix of both of them. I am obsessed with<br />
fashion, like my mother, and I am obsessed with art, like my father. I have something inside of me that<br />
every day tells me that nature and beauty is the soul, the meaning, of our life. And I also love Hollywood<br />
and cinema.” In February, Michele attended the Academy Awards, at the invitation of Jared Leto, who<br />
was recently appointed a brand ambassador for the fragrance Gucci Guilty.<br />
A few months later, on a steamy June evening in New York, Michele was honored at the American fashion<br />
industry’s equivalent of the Oscars: the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards. The ceremony<br />
took place at the Hammerstein Ballroom, on West Thirty-fourth Street. A red carpet had been set up<br />
along the sidewalk, and as the cocktail hour got under way designers and celebrities lined up to take their<br />
turn before the ranks of hollering photographers. Hari Nef wore a peppermint-green tulle gown with<br />
a glittering appliqué panther on the bosom; Gia Coppola, another Gucci devotee, was in a long dress<br />
confected of black netting embellished with red and pink sequins. Lena Dunham embraced Michele and<br />
complimented him on his cologne. Even his fragrance is antique: it was created in 1828 by the Florentine<br />
apothecary Santa Maria Novella.<br />
Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, wore a Gucci design: a sleeveless ivory column, in satin duchesse,<br />
embroidered with birds and flowers. She presented Michele with the International Award, declaring that<br />
he “has helped us dream more freely.” Michele ascended to the stage, his head slightly bowed. “I am quite<br />
nervous,” he said, clutching the award between fingers laden with vintage rings. “I would never have<br />
guessed that I would be given an award for doing the job that I love, and for my creativity.” The humility<br />
of his manner was in direct contradiction to the flamboyance of his dusty-pink silk tuxedo, which suggested<br />
a dandy who had run off to join the Hells Angels. On the back of the jacket, pearl beads formed the<br />
image of a coiled snake.<br />
When Michele first became interested in fashion, as a teen-ager, his impulse was to go into costume design.<br />
After high school, he enrolled in the Accademia di Costume e di Moda, in Rome. “I think that I still work
Image from Guccimuseo.com. Many of Guccio’s Italian clients<br />
were local horse-riding aristocrats, and their demand for<br />
riding gear led Gucci to develop its unique Horsebit icon - an<br />
enduring symbol of the fashion house and its increasingly<br />
innovative design aesthetic.<br />
like a costume designer,” he said. “I try to put<br />
some soul in the outfit—the idea of a character.”<br />
Upon graduating, though, he began working for<br />
an Italian knitwear company in Bologna. He then<br />
returned to Rome, to work at Fendi, where he met<br />
Frida Giannini, who was designing handbags. In<br />
2002, Giannini was hired by Gucci. She moved to<br />
the company’s design offices in London, and took<br />
Michele with her.<br />
The company had evolved significantly in the<br />
eighty years since Guccio Gucci opened his Florence<br />
shop. In the nineteen-twenties, Gucci sold<br />
luggage of the sort that Guccio had observed being<br />
used by guests at the Savoy Hotel in London,<br />
where he had worked as a young man. As Sara G.<br />
Forden relates, in “The House of Gucci” (2000),<br />
in the mid-thirties countries in the League of Nations<br />
protested Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia by<br />
imposing sanctions against Italian industry; Gucci,<br />
facing a leather shortage, was forced to innovate.<br />
The company began making fabric handbags<br />
with spare amounts of leather trim. It developed<br />
its signature diamond print and incorporated<br />
materials such as raffia and wicker into its designs.<br />
The new designs were very popular, and in 1938<br />
Gucci opened a luxuriously appointed boutique<br />
on Via Condotti, in Rome. By the fifties, when it<br />
added its first New York store, the company had<br />
become a status symbol for royalty and celebrities,<br />
including Elizabeth II, Grace Kelly, and the future<br />
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.<br />
But by the eighties Gucci had gone into decline,<br />
having become a predictable standby of the duty-free<br />
store. (Its horse-bit loafers were part of the<br />
Washington lobbyist’s uniform.) Seeking to revive<br />
the brand, Maurizio Gucci, then the company’s<br />
chairman, lured away Dawn Mello, an executive<br />
at Bergdorf Goodman. In 1990, Mello hired Tom<br />
Ford, then a little-known designer at Perry Ellis, to<br />
20 the difference in philosophy<br />
“I didn’t have the mind<br />
to appoint him,” Bizzarri<br />
recalled. “But when I was<br />
listening to him I really<br />
understood that he is<br />
Gucci. He has been living<br />
the brand for many<br />
years, understanding the<br />
history. He is more Gucci<br />
than anybody else.”<br />
Marco Bizzarri,<br />
Gucci’s president<br />
and C.E.O. on<br />
Alessandro Michele<br />
create Gucci’s first ready-to-wear collection for women. When Mello left the<br />
company to return to Bergdorf Goodman, as president, four years later, Ford<br />
became Gucci’s creative director.<br />
Ford gave Gucci a radical makeover, emphasizing slinky, bias-cut gowns, in<br />
black or white jersey, that featured plunging necklines, cutouts at the hip,<br />
and buckled waists. His designs evoked the louche allure of Studio 54 in the<br />
disco era. Ford, who grew up in New Mexico, and attended N.Y.U. and the<br />
Parsons School of Design, had a peculiarly American attachment to ideas<br />
of European sophistication. In 1996, he proclaimed, to the Times Magazine,<br />
“Too much style in America is tacky. It’s looked down upon to be too<br />
stylish.”<br />
Ford’s ostentatiously sexy designs had a broad influence. If, twenty years ago,<br />
you lived in narrow, low-waisted pants with a leg-lengthening flare at the calf,<br />
that was Tom Ford’s gift to you. Michele has a very different sensibility, but<br />
he admires Ford’s conjuring of the sartorial past. “I feel myself very close to<br />
Tom,” Michele told me. “He didn’t have another Faye Dunaway, or another<br />
Lauren Hutton, or another Bianca Jagger, but he wanted to create the illusion<br />
that they are still around us. He tried to make, in that time, something<br />
that didn’t exist anymore.”<br />
Sales initially surged under Ford, and Gucci once again became a formidable<br />
brand. In 1999, the company was acquired by Pinault-Printemps-Redoute,<br />
a French conglomerate. Luxury sales slumped after September, 2001, and<br />
in the early aughts Ford seemed, at times, to be losing his touch. (The Times<br />
decried “silly affairs involving cursive logos” and “too much fur.”) Ford and<br />
Domenico De Sole, Gucci’s C.E.O., were soon at loggerheads with their<br />
corporate parent, and in 2004 they exited the company. Ford’s post was split<br />
among three designers, including Giannini; two years later, she was appointed<br />
sole creative director, and Michele became her No. 2. “I did a lot of huge<br />
and beautiful bags,” Michele told me of this period. “I don’t have a problem<br />
to say I am a good merchandiser, because I love objects.” But the job was not<br />
a venue for self-expression. “I was not creative—I was more executive,” he<br />
said. “My job was to more or less work quite exactly from the idea of another<br />
person. I didn’t have freedom. I just put in ten per cent of my creativity.”<br />
When Giannini was fired, the fashion press bruited about many names as<br />
possible successors, including Riccardo Tisci, who had revitalized Givenchy,<br />
and Hedi Slimane, of Yves Saint Laurent. In some quarters, there were calls<br />
for a restoration of Tom Ford, who had gone on to establish his own label,<br />
and to direct movies. It was suggested to Marco Bizzarri,<br />
Gucci’s new president and C.E.O., that he should talk<br />
to Michele, whose long standing at the company might<br />
be useful in informing the search. “It was unplanned,”<br />
Bizzarri told me in London this spring. “Someone said<br />
to call him. They said, ‘He’s a good guy.’ ” The two met,<br />
and talked for hours. “I didn’t have the mind to appoint<br />
him,” Bizzarri recalled. “But when I was listening to him<br />
I really understood that he is Gucci. He has been living<br />
the brand for many years, understanding the history. He<br />
is more Gucci than anybody else.”<br />
Michele’s collections have highlighted his knowledge of<br />
Gucci’s past. A dress in delicate grass-green lace with<br />
a frilled plunging neckline has a ribbed waistband in<br />
the brand’s signature red-and-green stripe. The famous<br />
double-G motif proliferates on belt buckles and handbag<br />
prints, including one that Michele collaborated on with<br />
Trevor Andrew, a graffiti artist who goes by the name<br />
GucciGhost. Alexandra Shulman, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, told<br />
me, “When I saw the first women’s collection, in all honesty, I thought it<br />
looked a bit too vintage. There weren’t that many accessories—I couldn’t<br />
quite understand how that could be Gucci. But the way that he has taken<br />
the core of that idea, and in such a short time has made it what we think<br />
of as Gucci, is extraordinary.” Since Michele’s appointment, revenues at<br />
Gucci have risen: in the fourth quarter of 2015, sales were up thirteen per<br />
cent from the fourth quarter of 2014. Last fall, Bizzarri announced that, in<br />
defiance of retail convention, Gucci would not mark down prices, so that<br />
a Gucci garment bought at the start of the season would not lose its value<br />
when Black Friday dawned. François-Henri Pinault, the C.E.O. of Kering,<br />
as Gucci’s parent company is now known, told me, “When you look for a<br />
designer, you need someone who really understands the brand, and loves the<br />
brand. When you realize that what the designer is proposing is his own life,<br />
and his own creativity—it is not something that he does for the brand, but<br />
it’s his own personality—it’s very rare.”
Images from Gucci.com
1995<br />
Fall 1995 Ready-to-Wear Fall 1996 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Tom Ford<br />
Tom Ford<br />
Spring 2001 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Tom Ford<br />
Spring 2003 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Tom Ford<br />
2007<br />
Spring 2006 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Resort 2007<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Spring 2007 Menswear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Spring 2007 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
2015<br />
Spring 2015 Menswear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Spring 2015 Ready-to-wear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Fall 2015 Menswear<br />
Alessandro Michele<br />
Fall 2015 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Alessandro Michele<br />
GUCCI’s evolution
Fall 2004 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Tom Ford<br />
Spring 2005 Menswear<br />
John Ray<br />
Spring 2005 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Alessandra Facchinetti<br />
2006<br />
Spring 2006 Menswear<br />
John Ray<br />
2010<br />
Spring 2010 Menswear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Spring 2010 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Spring 2013 Menswear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Spring 2013 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Frida Giannini<br />
Spring 2016 Menswear<br />
Alessandro Michele<br />
Spring 2016 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Alessandro Michele<br />
Spring 2017 Menswear<br />
Alessandro Michele<br />
Spring 2017 Ready-to-Wear<br />
Alessandro Michele<br />
from Ford’s ostentiously sexy designs, later modelled after<br />
by Frida Giannini, to Alessandro Michele’s quirky, pretty<br />
yet not overtly sexy clothes.<br />
- present<br />
Image from Vogue.com
For their initial conversation about the future of Gucci, Bizzarri visited<br />
Michele in the apartment that Michele shares with Giovanni Attili. It is<br />
a tiny, obsessively curated space at the top of a building that overlooks a<br />
square not far from the Palazzo Alberini. The front door opens into a small<br />
wood-panelled library that feels like a Renaissance studiolo. The living-room<br />
floorboards are laid in a herringbone pattern; a marble fireplace has a<br />
mantel decorated with taxidermied birds, a gilt clock, an ornate porcelain<br />
candlestick, and other objects from Michele’s antique-store forays. A wall<br />
behind a couch is hung with dozens of objects: a pair of Baroque angels in<br />
plaster, mounted sets of antlers. An antique cradle from India sits under the<br />
window—it serves as a bed for Michele’s two pugs. In a narrow dining room,<br />
a farmhouse table stands under an enormous gilt mirror from the early<br />
nineteenth century; when I went to the apartment, Michele told me that the<br />
mirror had been deaccessioned from the Palazzo Pamphili, which was built<br />
for Pope Innocent X. In Michele’s bedroom, concealed behind panelled<br />
doors, is a large walk-in closet—the kind of place a child might explore if he<br />
or she wanted to escape Narnia, rather than clamber into it.<br />
Michele has two nephews, who, he said, are scared of a lot of things in<br />
the apartment—an animal skull sits atop a dresser—though they are also<br />
helplessly fascinated. “If you think about art, art is about being made a little<br />
bit uncomfortable,” he said. “When you are a kid, you always want to be in<br />
touch with something that makes you feel not comfortable. I have a machine<br />
from the seventeen-hundreds to make curly hair. You put the tip of it in the<br />
fire, and you can travel with it. It is very like a torture object. But when my<br />
nephews arrive at my apartment, they say, ‘Please, can we see the machine<br />
to make curly hair?’ There is something about discovering different things—<br />
things that make you feel curious and uncomfortable—that is very human.”<br />
June 2nd was the sixty-third anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth<br />
II at Westminster Abbey. That day, at noon, bells from the northwest<br />
tower pealed for half an hour to mark the occasion. They resounded in the<br />
cloister below, where hundreds of Gucci staff and hired hands were readying<br />
the site for the fashion show, which was to take place at three. It was an unseasonably<br />
cold day, and a square of leaden sky loomed above the lush green<br />
lawn, edged by four Gothic passageways, through which the models were to<br />
parade. Two rows of benches had been set up for guests: no fashion critic<br />
would have to perch on the chilly stone perimeter that had served generations<br />
of monks. Each seat was marked by an emerald velvet cushion that had<br />
been embroidered with a snake, a monkey, or a bee from the Gucci Garden.<br />
Michele was bundled against the cold in an off-white biker jacket covered<br />
in metal studs and embroidered with a cat’s face. Underneath the jacket,<br />
he wore a vivid green hoodie. “Look at my beautiful dressing room,” he<br />
said with a laugh, as he conducted me into the abbey’s Chapter House. An<br />
22 the difference in philosophy
“In this costume-drama<br />
context, Michele’s vision<br />
looked more familiar, if<br />
hardly less peculiar.”<br />
on Alessandro Michele’s Cruise 2017 collection<br />
enormous octagonal space with huge stained-glass windows, medieval wall<br />
paintings, and a vaulted ceiling supported by one delicate central column,<br />
it was built by Henry III in the thirteenth century, and is widely regarded as<br />
one of the finest examples of English Gothic.<br />
“I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my life,” Michele<br />
said. “It is like the Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris, but probably better, because of<br />
the shape. It is like an animal, like a plant.” Another medieval glory of the<br />
Chapter House—its floor of glazed tiles—had been covered with carpeting.<br />
Dozens of clothes racks held the outfits that Michele planned to present that<br />
afternoon. He walked among the racks, pausing to examine a dress made<br />
from lavish, multicolored Indian silk. Then he glanced up at the stained-glass<br />
windows, which were inlaid with images of British kings and queens. “Look<br />
at Elizabeth I, with the gorgiera—the collar—around her neck,” he said.<br />
“Beautiful.” Also circulating backstage was Giovanni Attili, who appeared<br />
to observe his partner’s occupation with a detached anthropological interest.<br />
He later told me, “Alessandro’s professional world is very different from<br />
mine. In this difference I find a source of nourishment. Not only is his imagination<br />
explosive and contagious—his grounded references always convey<br />
such meaningful suggestions to my work.” When not accompanying Michele,<br />
Attili spends months at a time in Canada, conducting research among the<br />
Dakelh and Haida peoples. He was toweringly tall and as immoderately<br />
bearded as Michele. “He’s Neptune,” Michele said, upon introducing Attili.<br />
“There is a sculpture in Piazza Navona—that is him.”<br />
The guests arrived. Women wearing gauzy Gucci dresses shivered in the cold<br />
as they took their seats. Shortly after three, loudspeakers that had been set up<br />
around the cloister’s edge started playing a recording of the English folk song<br />
“Scarborough Fair,” as arranged for boy choristers. Floodlights illuminated<br />
the Gothic passageways. Then a cavalcade of nearly a hundred models<br />
emerged from the cloister, wearing studded heels or towering platform<br />
sneakers or fur-lined backless loafers. They walked along slippery flagstones<br />
that had been worn smooth over centuries of use, and stepped on the flat<br />
tombstones of departed pre-Reformation monks.<br />
Images from Gucci.com, from the<br />
Cruise 2017 collection.<br />
MIDDLE: One of the many stripes<br />
seen at the show<br />
TOP RIGHT: The iconic bamboo<br />
handle returns, paying homage to<br />
the heritage of Gucci<br />
Polaroid images: Atmosphere at<br />
the runway show, held at Westminster<br />
Abbey<br />
the difference in philosophy<br />
23
In this costume-drama context, Michele’s<br />
vision looked more familiar, if hardly less<br />
peculiar. A pleated blue silk skirt, patterned<br />
with flowers, was paired with a boxy jacket<br />
in the same fabric; the jacket was edged with<br />
blue-and-green grosgrain ribbon, and a bow<br />
in the shape of a chrysanthemum was pinned<br />
at the neck. A long skirt in paisley-patterned<br />
silk was worn with a jacquard bomber jacket<br />
and spiky metallic-blue ankle boots. There<br />
was a profusion of accessorizing: handbags,<br />
eyeglasses, jewelry. More than one model<br />
wore a silk scarf tied over her hair and under<br />
her chin—a practical style sometimes favored<br />
by the Queen.<br />
For all the inspiration that Michele had taken<br />
from English style, the collection did not look<br />
especially British—though a slouchy Union<br />
Jack-patterned sweater was a clear homage<br />
to Vivienne Westwood, the British designer<br />
known for translating native English eccentricity<br />
into high fashion. Michele’s show was<br />
a fantasia that drew on ideas of Britishness<br />
while exploiting Italian luxury and craftsmanship.<br />
Occasionally, it seemed that his purpose<br />
was to render the models ridiculous, such as<br />
when he sent out some in platform sneakers<br />
with the kind of rainbow-colored soles<br />
that club kids wore in the nineties. At other<br />
moments, the plethora of bows, beads, and<br />
embroideries was irresistibly silly. Christina<br />
Binkley, of the Wall Street Journal, cheekily<br />
tweeted, “do it yourself @gucci resort17:<br />
Take your 6th grade togs, add iron-on heart<br />
and animal patches from @Etsy.”<br />
Though one could mock all the frippery, the<br />
show was disconcertingly lovely. Many outfits<br />
were covetable for their curiousness, like objects<br />
in a Wunderkammer. There were gasps<br />
when a model walked down the passageway<br />
in a full-length mink coat inset with coiling<br />
snakes: mink cutouts that had been dyed<br />
red, black, and white. The seductiveness of<br />
Michele’s vision was signalled by a barely<br />
subdued clamor among the guests over the<br />
emerald seat cushions, which were to be<br />
taken home as gifts. Several guests attempted<br />
surreptitiously to switch the cat or rabbit they<br />
had been assigned for a more desirable snake.<br />
The day after the show, I met Michele in a<br />
suite at the Savoy Hotel—the young Guccio<br />
Gucci’s training ground in luxury. Michele<br />
had retired in the early hours of the morning,<br />
having been up late dancing at a party held<br />
at 106 Piccadilly, a Georgian home that had<br />
once been a private club. Annie Lennox had<br />
made a surprise appearance, playing the<br />
piano. Michele was wearing a sweatshirt and<br />
jeans, his hair flowing over his shoulders. In<br />
his ring-loaded fingers, he was clutching an<br />
iPhone case in the shape of a dragon—a gift<br />
from a fashion correspondent from Singapore,<br />
who had been using it for his own phone until<br />
Michele’s magpie eye alighted upon it during<br />
the interview.<br />
“I am too old for this,” Michele said of the<br />
phone case. “But today I am sure I will be<br />
happy to go around the city with it.” He had<br />
work to do—the men’s ready-to-wear show<br />
would take place in a few weeks—but he<br />
hoped to steal some time to go to his favorite<br />
antique store, near Bond Street.<br />
“I bought this there,” he said, extending his<br />
hand to point out an English funeral ring. It<br />
was backed by woven human hair and bore a<br />
tiny image of a skeleton holding what looked<br />
like a telescope. On the inside of the ring was<br />
a date: February, 1695. The person commemorated<br />
by the ring, Michele speculated, “was<br />
a soldier, or a sailor.” He asked me, “Is it not<br />
beautiful? I love that the English celebrate<br />
death.”<br />
Michele owns dozens of funeral rings, and<br />
he has posted images of some of them on<br />
Instagram. His private collections have become<br />
part of his public reimagining of Gucci.<br />
He told me that he did not regret the loss of<br />
privacy. “I feel that, as an artist, the big point<br />
is to share, and to let people think about what<br />
you are showing,” he said. “Sharing isn’t anything<br />
that scares me. My house, my life, my<br />
way to live, for me is kind of a masterpiece.”<br />
As he went on, his observations sounded more<br />
and more like those of his father: “I take care<br />
about what I put in my life, because life is<br />
an illusion, you know. It’s real that we are on<br />
the Earth, but we don’t know for how long.<br />
The idea of tomorrow is an illusion. So I<br />
want to put this kind of illusion into my life.”<br />
Michele grasped for the right word in English<br />
to explain himself. “How do you say illudere?<br />
To ‘illuse’ myself ? To make an illusion for<br />
myself ?”<br />
I replied that the closest word in English was<br />
“delusion,” but noted that it had negative<br />
connotations. Michele was surprised. “In<br />
Italian, we can say that beauty is something<br />
that you create—that you create the illusion<br />
of your life,” he said. “It is to believe in something<br />
that doesn’t exist, like a magician, or a<br />
wizard.” He went on, “I was thinking over the<br />
past few days that the purpose of fashion is<br />
to give an illusion. I think that everybody can<br />
create their masterpiece, if you build your life<br />
how you want it. Just to create that illusion of<br />
your life—this is beautiful.”<br />
Photographs from Gucci.com, Cruise 2017, Gucci Garden<br />
24 the difference in philosophy
Images from Gucci.com, from the<br />
Cruise 2017 collection.<br />
A heart and snake on GG motif<br />
bags, a watch featuring a golden<br />
bee on the dial, and the Princetown<br />
slippers with embroidered<br />
tigers—just some of the curated<br />
tokens from the Gucci Gift catalogue,<br />
shot in the lush Ninfa Garden,<br />
located in Cisterna di Latina,<br />
near Rome with a cast of animals<br />
from the Gucci Garden including a<br />
tiger, rabbits, turtles and a horse.
Photographs from Gucci.com, Spring Summer 2016 collection.<br />
>> Resulting Success<br />
Analysis of the success<br />
of Gucci under Alessandro<br />
Michele’s helm<br />
by Ruby Abbiss, for thefashionlaw.com<br />
The fashion industry is rife with creative director<br />
house-swaps and corresponding revamps. Amid<br />
such press-worthy shakeups, one certainly stands<br />
out: The new Gucci, à la Alessandro Michele,<br />
the quiet Italian creative, who was appointed to<br />
the role of creative director early last year, after<br />
working for years behind the scenes with former<br />
creative chief, Frida Giannini.<br />
After making his womenswear debut in Milan in<br />
February 2015, Michele has created incredible<br />
buzz around the formerly tired Florence-founded<br />
house. Consider, for example, his Spring/Summer<br />
2016 collection. The “multicolored, sparkly”<br />
frocks from that collection have nabbed the<br />
covers of Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, i-D, The<br />
Gentlewoman, and Marie Claire, among other<br />
prominent publications. In fact, Gucci has landed<br />
the most spring 2016 magazine covers thus far,<br />
according to a number of industry reports.<br />
These designs are not just sacred showpieces,<br />
though. Michele has enchanted celebrities, bloggers,<br />
buyers, and editors, inviting them to forget<br />
their previous notions of the famed Italian design<br />
house and lust after his every design – from floral<br />
print garments to kangaroo fur lined shoes. As a<br />
result, his designs are jumping from the runway<br />
and magazine covers to the red carpet and the<br />
street with significant frequency. There was nary<br />
a major fashion site that did not have a slew of<br />
Gucci-clad street style stars in its Fashion Week<br />
street style gallery. Similarly, Michele’s Gucci has<br />
been spotted on every major red carpet so far.<br />
The demand for the new Gucci is undeniably<br />
present. What is not quite as straight forward is<br />
why. Is it that the market is really taking a turn<br />
for less-is-more in terms of what is deemed sexy<br />
(which is the Michele for Gucci aesthetic in a<br />
nutshell), or is there more going on here? It seems<br />
obvious that the latter is the case. Sure, it can<br />
likely be said that the sleepy sexy look and gender<br />
fluidity that Michele is pushing are resonating<br />
with consumers, but there is a lot more going into<br />
the house’s revamp than a change in aesthetic.<br />
What is actually<br />
driving the successful<br />
revamp of Gucci?<br />
resulting success<br />
27
TIMING IS EVERYTHING<br />
Take the timing into account. The announcement of Michele’s<br />
appointment came at a relatively quiet moment in fashion –<br />
before the Hedi Slimane departure rumors started, before Raf<br />
Simons took the industry by surprise when he announced that he<br />
was leaving Christian Dior, and before Alber Elbaz was abruptly<br />
shown the door at Lanvin. As we have come to see first hand, over<br />
the past several years, in particular, this game of musical chairs<br />
proves immensely entertaining for fashion fans. With the creative<br />
directors of big houses being thrust into the spotlight – becoming<br />
celebrities of sorts – the level of interest amongst those on the<br />
periphery has risen.<br />
So, the natural cycle of musical chairs (which was been sped up<br />
enormously over the past several years) becomes something of a<br />
must-watch, must-witness process from the initial appointment<br />
speculation rumors, to the confirmation, to the subsequent debut<br />
and the aftermath, the latter of which tends to be polarizing. For<br />
instance, as Vanessa Friedman recently wrote of Slimane’s YSL:<br />
“Remember the initial shock! horror! at his grunge girls on the<br />
runway in Season 2?” As such, creative director debuts – which<br />
appear to be coming with increased frequency – are something of<br />
an interactive experience, complete with nail-biting anticipation.<br />
And the Michele for Gucci appointment has been no exception.<br />
Following months of rumors that Gucci’s former creative director,<br />
Frida Giannini, was to be ousted, after years of disappointing<br />
growth for the Italian design house, both Giannini and her real-life<br />
partner and Gucci CEO, Patrizio di Marco, were out. The<br />
fashion press had a field day. The publication of articles entitled,<br />
“Inside the Messy Firing of Gucci’s CEO and Creative Director”<br />
and “Downfall of Gucci’s power couple” ensued. But the drama<br />
did not end there; according to a report by the New York Times,<br />
on the heels of di Marco’s firing, he allegedly sent out a 3,000-<br />
page memo, some of which was made public. There was also the<br />
alleged speech (read: rant) that di Marco delivered to his employees<br />
at the Gucci cafeteria in Florence shortly before his departure.<br />
Such chief-level shake-ups do not just sell magazines or garner<br />
page views, they arguably create a sense of excitement, which, of<br />
course, must be coupled with the fact that such activity also tends<br />
to have a negative effect on value. As Vanessa Friedman noted in<br />
connection with Slimane’s recent departure: “Products themselves<br />
require investment. They are not cheap. Consumers have to<br />
believe they will hold their meaning over time. And the meaning is<br />
created by the designer.” This is undoubtedly true, but in Gucci’s<br />
case it seems to have produced more pros than cons.<br />
An injection of relevance with Giannini’s ouster and new life after<br />
Michele’s appointment put Gucci back on the map in Milan. It<br />
has certainly given fellow Italian brand, Prada, a run for its money<br />
in terms of being one of the most anticipated and talked-about<br />
shows during any given season. And as we have learned, consumers<br />
may just be buying a lot more Gucci than before. The house<br />
has posted growth (Gucci revenue advanced 4.8 percent for the<br />
fourth quarter of 2015, compared with the 1.5 percent growth<br />
expected by analysts, as reported in February), whereas its Prada<br />
continues to struggle in that regard.<br />
TURNING TALK INTO ACTION<br />
Gucci has taken its newfound fame and capitalized on it, using<br />
celebrities as leverage. Christina Binkley, fashion columnist for the<br />
Wall Street Journal, told us recently that Gucci is the celebrity’s<br />
go-to brand at the moment “because it’s the hottest brand around,<br />
their photos go viral when they wear it, and Gucci is brilliant<br />
about working with celebs.”<br />
This proves true as this award season saw Gucci being draped<br />
over the backs of Cate Blanchett at the Spirit Awards; Harry<br />
Styles at the American Music Awards; Nicole Kidman at the SAG<br />
Awards; Brie Larsson, Jared Leto, Lee Byung-Hun and Ryan<br />
Gosling at the Oscars; and, let’s not forget the event bigger than<br />
any red carpet in the U.S.: the Super Bowl, for which Lady Gaga<br />
wore custom Gucci. “It’s just good business on everyone’s part,”<br />
Binkley explains. “Also, particularly with men’s wear, there really<br />
isn’t anything out there to compete with those zany printed suits,<br />
so if you’re Harry Styles, there you are!”<br />
There is also something to be said for making and showing<br />
clothes people actually want to wear – something few houses have<br />
managed to do quite as well (as indicated by their need to revamp<br />
other aspects of their brands, such as the runway schedule and<br />
their deliveries, in an attempt to lure consumers back into stores).<br />
Michele, on the other hand, “has tapped a nerve. If you look<br />
closely, he’s drawing on bits and pieces from many other labels<br />
[and putting them together].” Binkley cites Dries van Noten,<br />
Marco Zannini’s Rochas, Chloé and Saint Laurent as potential<br />
inspiration, “He’s assembling them into a look that is strangely<br />
desirable right now. It’s an intellectual look, and it’s fearless.” This<br />
fearlessness seems perfect not only for gaining attention on the<br />
28 resulting success
ed carpet but also for street style – a time when blending into the<br />
background is definitely not the aim of the game for the fashion<br />
personalities strolling between shows. With each recent fashion<br />
month that has passed, we have seen Gucci’s silky pussy-bows,<br />
androgynous silhouettes and enchanting, jewel-toned prints worn<br />
by just about every truly major street style figure, including by not<br />
limited to Bryanboy, Anna Dello Russo, and Susie Lau.<br />
Another connoisseur of street style, Fashion Features Editor of<br />
Sunday Times Style, Pandora Sykes, believes the popularity of<br />
Gucci is due to how easy it is both on the eye and the mind: “It’s<br />
so much fun! It’s bright and very Instagrammable,” she told us.<br />
“By his own admission, Alessandro isn’t trying to make a political<br />
statement. The shininess of his new collection is about having fun.<br />
Getting popular figures like Hari Nef on board to take over their<br />
social media channels is always great PR.”<br />
Sykes, who was also a Gucci fan in Frida Giannini’s time, wrote<br />
on her own blog in November 2015 of her love for Gucci being<br />
specifically about the logo. The population shares the love of a<br />
logo and Sykes believes Michele has tapped into this: “Alessandro<br />
knows the value of saleability, which Gucci coffers badly needed.<br />
Look at the logo belts, cheap enough for someone who doesn’t<br />
have the budget for a Gucci coat to buy into the brand and clearly<br />
show that they are wearing Gucci. The price point is clever, the<br />
loafers are £400-£500 (roughly $570-$710) and not £700 (roughly<br />
$990) like many designer shoes and the Soho bags start at £600<br />
(roughly $850).”<br />
Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture, it seems<br />
like Gucci is doing it right from every angle: public relations, the<br />
right amount of accessibility, celebrity endorsement, street style<br />
endorsement, and this season, help from an edgy street artist. Yes,<br />
Gucci tapped Brooklyn-based artist, Trevor “Trouble” Andrew,<br />
aka GucciGhost, to take his hand at some logomania graffiti art.<br />
IS IT MEANT TO LAST?<br />
But is any of this meant to last? With the year-long abundance of<br />
press around Michele’s Gucci, it’s hard to believe the popularity is<br />
everlasting, especially given the plague of short-termism that runs<br />
rampant through the industry.<br />
London-based fashion correspondent and fashion lecturer<br />
Julia Robson believes we are in the midst of a Gucci “wave” of<br />
sorts. “I think global fashion is currently still just immersed in<br />
“Michele-ism” in a similar way a few years back it was all about<br />
“Philo-ism,” when Phoebe Philo was steering fashion towards her<br />
clean aesthetic with Céline. Robson believes that mixed with the<br />
appeal of his Vetements brand, Demna Gvasalia’s deconstructed<br />
Balenciaga will likely be the next “wave” for the fashion aesthetic:<br />
“It’s clearly not going to be a long term effect with Michele but<br />
short term. This season you can see the impact of Gucci rippling<br />
through many other collections, but it won’t last forever.” Fashion<br />
is nothing if not cyclical, after all.<br />
Binkley is also skeptical as to whether Michele’s popularity will<br />
remain. “There’s no telling at this point whether he’s built for<br />
just this era, or if he’ll transition. Nobody can maintain this<br />
level of popularity forever,” she says, yet she believes that Philo<br />
and Michele are opposites: “They’re similar in that they’re both<br />
obsessions but Philo is about power and control – feminine power.<br />
Michele is about letting your freak fly.” Their aesthetics are also<br />
the antithesis of each other. Philo is a champion of the minimalistic<br />
with an emphasis on timelessness, and is known to be a<br />
woman’s woman.<br />
Her customers, the self-dubbed “Philophiles” have also proven<br />
that Philo’s popularity has not diminished terribly and the industry<br />
is as interested in her work as ever, especially with the rumors<br />
of her leaving Celine.<br />
On the other hand, Gucci is the brand for the ultimate maximalist.<br />
Pushing perhaps even further than Miuccia Prada’s<br />
label, Michele layers historical reference on historical reference,<br />
creating a collection that is a carefully created dressing-up box<br />
of aesthetically beautiful and well-crafted clothes. In terms of<br />
the near future, Binkley believes profits will rise steadily into the<br />
double-digit increases. “Long term, the house will outlive us all,<br />
one designer after another, with high points and low points in<br />
popularity,” she says.<br />
Predictions for Gucci’s future aside, and considering that we don’t<br />
know whether Michele is someone who will transition with the<br />
newly implemented 3-year or so schedule, what we do know is<br />
that his current popularity is unrivalled. Binkley aptly describes<br />
the Gucci wearer of today, saying: “Everyone who ever felt like a<br />
weird kid, or too smart to be popular, or totally out of sync with<br />
the jocks can wear Gucci and feel like they’re finally cool.” And in<br />
a landscape that is pushing for more disruption of the traditional<br />
high fashion model, including a wider sense of inclusiveness,<br />
there’s certainly something to be said for Michele’s approach.<br />
resulting success<br />
29
“To make something new in<br />
fashion, you have to stay in<br />
a little bit of mad place and<br />
do a revolution.”<br />
- Alessandro Michele<br />
LEFT: Photograph from Gucci.com, Spring Summer 2016 collection. TOP: globalfashionnews.com
March 2017